China’s Open-oriented Innovation System: Viewing from the International Perspective(No.139, 2017)

2017-12-20

By Xiong Hongru, Research Team on “ Building an Open-oriented Innovation System against the Backdrop of Globalization”, Research Department of Innovative Development, DRC

Research report No.139, 2017 (Total 5214) 2017-10-25

Abstract: Open-oriented innovation is the major trend driving global intellectual development and technological transmission. As the innovation systems of various countries have become increasingly interdependent, the relevant governments have reached a common consensus relating to the promotion of open-oriented innovation system. This paper proposed an open-oriented innovation evaluation system covering five aspects including knowledge, technology, capital, talents and rules as well as twenty indicators, and analyzed China’s open-oriented innovation system through an international-perspective-based comparison. The research findings show that China’s open-oriented innovation system is featured by low-level openness and imbalanced structure, ranking among the countries with mid-to-low level of open-oriented innovation development in the world. In this regard, China is left behind those developed countries in terms of some key indicators, which are not in step with China’s economic power and innovation development across the board. China is facing urgent demands to improve its open-oriented innovation capacity and to further integrate its experience with that of the world in order to transform itself from a late starter to a frontrunner. Based on a clear understanding of the major weak points, the government needs to create a favorable social environment to allow innovation factors to become highly clustered and flow freely, improve the open-oriented innovation institutional mechanism in cutting-edge areas and steadily enhance in depth and in breadth the integration of China’s open-oriented innovation system with the global innovation networks.

Key words: open-oriented innovation, national innovation systems, openness, a comparison between China and the world